Why we must keep the ideas of Gauri Lankesh alive
The brutal killing of Gauri Lankesh is a double tragedy. It was tragic because it cut a life short at its moment of creativity, where Gauri was one of the few successful figures blending the vernacular and the cosmopolitan. A project was left incomplete and a storyteller and a story were terminated. The fragility of incompleteness and vulnerability haunted Gauri’s life. But there is a deeper tragedy today.
Trivialised
One senses that the Gauri one knew is already trivialised and banalised, appropriated by interest groups, lionised by ideologists, in a way that distorted the complexity of her politics. As a friend explained, politics was a kind of compulsive talking, a debate and eventually a battle over differences. The professional, the charming part of Gauri, the bold sense of hypothesis and experiment is lost to a world of stereotypes and prejudices. Gauri died and something in Bengaluru died with her. The hysteria around her murder articulated that unease
Gauri Lankesh as a presence signalled a difference, a confidence. She was a Left liberal heroine whom the right hated to the hilt. They could not dismiss her as alien, or elite because she spoke in the vernacular and did so with a confidence that made her cosmopolitan. One could not speak of the effeteness of Left liberalism when one invoked Gauri’s almost muscular style. One has to understand that her legacy was her style, her openness to issues, a boldness that was almost artistically experimental. In the moment of her death, we forget this exuberance for life.
The narratives in the media almost sounded like the fable of the blind men and the elephant, each touched a part and appropriated it for the story. Rationalists, feminists, Dalits, naxals, each fetishised a part of Gauri. In that sense, the rationalists were the worst, seeing in Gauri’s death a serial sequence from Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi, and Lankesh.
There was an almost paranoid glee to the sequence as if rationalism was a threatened species. To reduce Gauri to this one aspect destroys her wide-ranging mind. The fight for rationalism has to be embedded in the wider injustices of caste, gender, and other inequalities. By creating silos around her, one also oversimplifies the political world that Gauri engaged in.
She struggled against stereotypes, especially the fait accomplis of vote banks politics. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah in a left-handed tribute virtually appropriates Gauri with the coming election in mind. For the CM, anything available has to be harnessed to the electoral machine.
The first thing he does is, in a unique gesture he promises some of the leading intellectuals the comfort of police security, dumbing and impoverishing dissent at the same moment. No doubt some of the intellectuals felt a sense of threat but to accept such an offer without any consideration for the scores of small-town journalists and whistle-blowers seems to indicate a self-preoccupation.
Risk
Public intellectuals do not quite remain public with sten gun-toting security around them. They become VIPs of ideas and lose that sense of risk, the cutting edge that made their ideas threatening. That sense of risk is part of their vocation. One can hardly see Solzhenitsyn, Havell, Tutu or Neruda running around hysterically for security. I am not denying the fact of a threat but there is a comfort zone one has to challenge.
Intellectual life and ideas have that sense of risk, a price we pay for having them. When such lists as the CM is announced, it almost becomes a small town bureaucrat’s obsession Whether Karnad is in or Guha is out. It is as if one has made some honours list parodying the very regime we challenged.
There is a deeper warning here that the Left liberal have to accept that their politics is not reduced by political parties to a vote bank politics. A vote bank politics changes ideas into commodities and commodifying Gauri’s death would be obscene.
Politics
This is also crucial because Gauri’s politics easily went beyond the electoral and the ideological to create a multifaceted politics. Gauri could talk Vokkaliga politics, debate with Naxals, discuss ideas with UR Ananthamurthy. She was neither neuter nor neutral to the variety of events happening around her. To let her be complex would be appropriated by one group or one strand of her life would be unfair to the whole. Gauri Lankesh was larger than life because she was a challenge to life, and this civil society must somehow sustain and remember.
One wonders if one could make a few modest suggestions in this regard. Civil society must make sure the interest groups do not paralyse or appropriate her life. To do so, we need open forums to keep her politics alive and open to debate. The compulsive Gauri who talked and talked, combining gossip and discourse has to be kept alive.
We need forums and hypotheses to sustain her imagination which sees Karnataka not just as the angelic ivory tower world of science but the world of Dalit struggles, mining contractors’ communal groups. To keep Gauri alive is to keep the memory of that politics alive inventing it in new ways. One hopes civil society takes this seriously and responds to it in the weeks to come.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)